Daily Mail denies pressuring Lilly Wachowski into coming out
The Daily Mail has denied pressuring Matrix director Lilly Wachowski into coming out as trans.
The director of the Matrix trilogy and sister of Lana Wachowski, who came out as trans four years ago, released a statement today coming out.
Titled ‘Sex change shocker – Wachowski brothers now sisters!!!’, the statement was released by the Windy City Times.
Along with her sister, Lana, Lilly forms part of the Wachowski duo that also created Cloud Atlas and the hit Netflix drama, Sense 8.
Lana transitioned in 2000 and made it public in 2012, when she became an advocate for trans awareness and opened up about the difficulties she faced in the process.
Lana Wachowski
In the statement by the 48-year-old, Lilly said she decided to go public after a reporter for the Daily Mail had tried to get information about her transition.
She said that journalist, and various others, had approached her agent asking about her transition.
However a spokesman for the US version of Mail Online, denied that she had been approached.
“DailyMail.com categorically denies that it in any way tried to coerce Lilly Wachowski into revealing her gender transition,” the spokesman told the Guardian.
The spokesman went on to say that the reporter in question had been “extremely sympathetic and courteous at all times”.
“As Ms Wachowski herself says, we were not the first media organisation to approach her and we made absolutely clear at several points in the conversation that we were only interested in reporting the story if and when she was happy for us to do so and with her cooperation,” they said.
They went on to express surprise at the statement released by Wachowski “given the courtesy and sensitivity with which the reporter approached her”.
In her statement, Wachowski also referred to the Mail’s “huge part in the national public outing” of Lucy Meadows, a primary school teacher who took her own life after a Daily Mail column by Richard Littlejohn was published with the title ‘He’s not only in the wrong body … he’s in the wrong job’.
